Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to meeting management and more particularly to an online meeting tool facilitating participation in-person meeting.
Description of the Related Art
The rapid development of the Internet has led to advanced modes of communication and collaboration. Using the Internet as a backbone, individuals worldwide can converge in cyberspace to share ideas, documents and images in a manner not previously possible through conventional telephony and video conferencing. To facilitate collaboration over the Internet, a substantial collection of technologies and protocols have been assembled to effectively deliver audio, video and data over the single data communications medium of the Internet. These technologies include both static synchronous forms of collaboration such as instant messaging and application sharing, and asynchronous forms of collaboration such as discussion forums and document libraries.
An e-meeting represents one popular form of electronic collaboration. In an e-meeting, participants can view a common space, for instance a whiteboard or a shared application (or both), through which ideas can be exchanged. The viewing of the common space can be complemented with a teleconference, a videoconference, an instant messaging session, or any combination thereof, such that the e-meeting can act as a near substitute for an in-person meeting in a conference room. Notwithstanding, many prefer an old-fashioned in-person meeting to an e-meeting of the modern computing infrastructure.
In this regard, in an in-person meeting, the context and content of presentation ideas and materials can be established based upon the attendees present in the meeting. Further, to determine the identity and nature of the attendees to an in-person meeting can be as simple as taking a visual scan of the room or conducting a roll call. Most importantly, in an in person meeting, the unspoken manner of communications amongst human beings can be readily detected—namely the processing of body language and facial expressions in connection with the comprehension of spoken language so as to ascertain a true message communicated by one attendee of the in-person meeting to another.
Of note, the task of participating in an in-person meeting therefore, is of greater difficulty than that of an e-meeting where the pace of interaction is necessarily slower due to the dependence upon technological tools to facilitate the collaboration of the e-meeting. In contrast, the pace of an in-person meeting can be so quick as to challenge each participant to keep pace with the exchange of ideas that often occurs in an in-person meeting. Online tools can be of some help in this regard. Those online tools include access to a Web search engine from which instant topical research in a topic of interest can be retrieved by a participant to an in-person meeting. Also, access to an on-line enterprise application can account for the rapid retrieval of contextual relevant data during an in-person meeting. Yet, much of the effectiveness of real-time data retrieval during an in-person meeting depends upon the agility of the participant in identifying a need to retrieve data in real time and satisfying that need. For an in-person meeting of particular fast pace, the ability of the participant to demonstrate such agility is limited.